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The following is an excerpt from City Parks, Clean Water, a report by The Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence that examines the role of urban parks in managing stormwater. This is the sixth installment in a series of 19 posts.

A schoolyard in New York is easing the burden on an overtaxed waterway while also providing additional community play space in a park-poor neighborhood.

Brooklyn’s P.S. 261, whose schoolyard had been paved over decades earlier, leaving a half-acre of asphalt and a deteriorated jungle gym for recess, was one of the few locations in its neighborhood that had a bit of open space. Fortunately, the site was a priority for two different city agencies — the city’s Department of Education (for playground renovation) and the Department of Environmental Protection (for water quality improvements from reduced sewer overflows) — as well as a private conservation group, The Trust for Public Land.

Asphalt schoolyard before renovations (Mary Alice Lee)

After renovations (Pedro Diez)

TPL has been working with New York City since 1996 to convert school playgrounds into after-school-hours community parks. In the early days of the partnership, the goal was merely to work with students, parents, teachers and community residents to create great play spaces with such amenities as fields, running tracks, gazebos, basketball and game courts, and even hair-braiding areas. Beginning in 2012, the mission was expanded to also include stormwater management.

P.S. 261 was the first of what became 40 schoolyard renovations carried out through the three-way partnership. Although the construction could have become a source of strife in the community, the public process and the many ancillary benefits to the neighborhood were so compelling that the reworked park was accepted enthusiastically. Permeable pavers reduce runoff from the hardtop, rain gardens and the artificial turf field absorb runoff, and the gazebo features a green roof and rain barrels to store runoff for irrigation during dry spells. The field itself consists of permeable artificial turf underlain with broken stone to store stormwater and perforated pipes for drainage. All told, the half-acre park can capture about 500,000 gallons of stormwater annually.

Student drawings inspired the art on the schoolyard’s new, permeable blacktop. The outdoor classroom space and gardens are visible in the background.(Pedro Diez)

Fortunately, even in the cramped quarters of an inner-city schoolyard, it’s not either/or — play or store. “Stormwater management features always rank high on kids’ priority
lists. They like green spaces,” explained Mary Alice Lee, New York playground program
director for TPL. “It’s not a tradeoff between basketball courts and rain gardens since we
can squeeze both into even a small space.”

Each renovated schoolyard costs about $1 million (including $650,000 for construction) and is funded primarily by the two agencies with supplemental donations raised by TPL. As with other schoolyards renovated through the initiative, P.S. 261 must be open to the general public outside of the school day from dawn to dusk and on weekends, vacations, and holidays; the school’s custodian receives extra compensation from the city for taking on added responsibilities in the schoolyard.

“There are always growing pains in taking a successful program to scale,” explained
DEP assistant commissioner Angela Licata, “but our only challenge has been managing
construction delays against our strict consent decree deadlines. This was such a
clear win-win situation for us and the school that we’d like to see participatory design
and stormwater management become standard practice in every schoolyard capital
improvement in New York.”

To promote physical activity and mental development, parks need great playgrounds. To make trails and walkways welcoming, parks need excellent horticulture. To lure tourists and other first-time visitors, parks need art, visual excitement‚ and high-quality workmanship. To make all users feel wanted, respected, safe, and oriented, parks need pleasing and effective signage. If all these elements are present, they add up to that memorable result—great design.

It may seem odd that design could be related to health, but it’s true: pleasing predictability encourages participation. If the basics are well provided, people will flock to the system and use it to the fullest.

An example of good park signage. Credit: Coleen Gentles

Signage may be the most overlooked amenity. Parks without signs are like elevators without buttons, libraries without book numbers, or restaurants without menus. At best, signless parks are confusing and frustrating; at worst they are intimidating and frightening. To cite only one example of many, at an unsigned fork on a national park trail in Arlington, Virginia, one path leads 18 miles to Mount Vernon, while the other crosses the Potomac River to Washington, D.C. More than two dozen years after the trail’s construction, there is still no guidance for the thousands of tourists each year who stand at that critical juncture, scratching their heads.

Good signage can do much more than just point the way. It can also provide distance measurements for walkers, runners‚ and cyclists; denote hours of operation or road closures; indicate the way to refreshments, restrooms‚ and emergency call boxes; relate historical and ecological information; convey rules and safety instruction; and even provide health tips and information about calories burned in a particular activity.

Another parklike space that benefits from good design is the urban schoolyard. Too often, schoolyards are poorly designed, maintained‚ and managed—simply slabs of asphalt surrounded by chain-link fences with a locked gate. For a few hours each school day, children use them to burn off steam, but the valuable land gets no activity after school and on weekends, even in neighborhoods desperate for park space. (In the worst cases, they are used as teacher parking lots.) In contrast, school systems and park departments in cities including Boston, Denver, Houston‚ New York, and Phoenix have cooperated in redesigning and rebuilding schoolyards into year-round play parks, serving students during school hours and the full community at other times. The best ones include trees, gardens‚ and performance stages as well as exercise gear and locations for exercise, games, climbing, jumping rope, and more.

Credit: Marni Horwitz

In an unusual public-private partnership, New York City is rebuilding derelict schoolyards for students and opening them to the full community outside school hours. A three-way program of the board of education, the department of parks and recreation, and The Trust for Public Land, the effort focuses on park-poor neighborhoods and is part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030, which aims to provide safe play places within a ten-minute walk of every child in New York City.

“It’s hard to imagine a space that provides more health benefit for more young people per square foot than a school playground,” said Mary Alice Lee, director of the New York City Playground Program for TPL. “Converting an expanse of cracked asphalt into a colorful, exciting space with a field, track, trees, performance stage, interactive garden, slides, climbers, hair-braiding area, and jump-rope area is revelatory for these kids. They just explode with activity and creativity.” And then, after school and on weekends, with the gates open, the children and families of the rest of the community get their chance, too.

The partnership, which began in 1996, is expected to create 256 playgrounds, resulting in nearly 200 acres of new city parkland by 2012. On average each playground costs $1 million and begins with an in-depth participatory design process that includes community members, representatives from after-school programs, students, parents, school administrators, teachers, and custodial staff. During a three-month student-design phase, TPL meets weekly with four classes at the school. Students learn how to do surveying, conduct sunlight studies, and interview community stakeholders, and they work with landscape architects and equipment manufacturers to choose play equipment that is age-appropriate and within budget. “The empowerment of the participatory design process, especially for children in underserved neighborhoods, is critical,” says Lee.

Of the renovated playgrounds, most are owned by the New York City Department of Education and maintained by school custodial staff; some are owned by the city parks department. The Trust for Public Land contracts with a local partner, such as a neighborhood organization, after-school group, or parent-teacher association to provide programming outside school hours. Frequently, the partner group works with the custodial staff to close and open the schoolyard on weekends and in the evening. Most of the schoolyards are open all day on weekends and during the summer and from 3 p.m. until dusk on weekdays. (In a few tougher neighborhoods‚ the hours are set at 3 p.m.–6 p.m. on weekdays, 10 a.m.–2 p.m. on Saturdays‚ and closed on Sundays.)

Interestingly, it is spontaneous play among students that has most increased following reconstruction of the playgrounds. While observations revealed a 25 percent increase in structured games and competitions, unstructured play jumped by a stunning 240 percent. This includes not only play on exercise equipment and running around, but also socializing and “hanging out.” Unstructured activity is valuable in helping even the least athletic children enjoy recreation and develop social skills and imagination.

In 2008, 19 percent of U.S. children between ages 6 and 19 were judged to be overweight. Providing an attractive, thoughtfully designed playground is an effective way to increase physical activity and combat childhood obesity. It is here that the New York playground program shows results. Based on a study of three renovated playgrounds in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens, the weekday visits (including after school) increased by an impressive average of 71 percent to just under 75,000 per site per year.

Want to know more ways urban park systems can best promote health and wellness? Read this publication from The Trust for Public Land.

Schoolyards are large, flat, centrally located open spaces with a mandate to serve the recreational needs of schoolchildren. Great schoolyards–the rare ones that have healthy grass, big trees, a playground, and sports equipment–seem a lot like parks. But they aren’t. For one thing, most have fences and locks. For another, they are closed to the general public. Schoolyards are parks for only a limited constituency. But they have terrific potential to be more than that. Even less-than-great schoolyards (those that are merely expanses of asphalt with few amenities) represent sizable opportunities in key locations. To many observers, schoolyards seem the best, most obvious source of park-like land to supplement the park systems of overcrowded cities. And they are–even if upgrading them into schoolyard parks is more difficult than it might seem.

“Schoolyard park” in this context means a space reserved for schoolchildren during school hours and used by the whole community at other times. In a few cities–New York, Chicago, and Phoenix–schoolyard parks are run cooperatively by the board of education and the parks department. In others, the parks department has no formal role at all.

The pockmarked and cracked asphalt lot before it was developed into I.S. 62-The Ditmas School playground in Brooklyn, NY. Credit: Julieth Rivera.

Most schoolyards originally had grass and trees. But without proper design, construction, and maintenance, grass can’t survive daily trampling by hundreds of little feet. And small trees can’t handle that much swinging and climbing without becoming spindly skeletons. After a few years of frustration with dust, mud, and dead trees, school principals begin to think that laying down asphalt might be a superior solution (and barely any worse ecologically). It’s also a lot easier to sweep up broken glass from asphalt than from dirt and weeds. Then, this being America, the expanse of asphalt starts to attract automobiles; in no time the former school park has a set of parallel white lines and a row of oil stains. Keeping a schoolyard green, clean, car-free, and environmentally productive can be more difficult than operating a regular neighborhood park.

Maintenance can also be thorny. Most school districts are either unable or unwilling to keep schoolyards up to the standards that parks require. After all, money spent on horticulture for the community-at-large is money not spent on the education of children. But school districts also generally balk at turning the maintenance responsibility over to the park department. They worry about losing control over their children’s space.

There are successful programs to refurbish school lands in both Boston (the Boston Schoolyard Initiative) and Denver (Learning Landscapes). Both programs are fully under the direction and control of the school system with no involvement of the park department. The schoolyards are open to the general community except during school hours; they are all fenced. Converting each former space in Denver from what one administrator called “scorched earth that resembled a prison yard” into an irrigated and drained Learning Landscape with a field, two play structures, a hard-surface court and a “community gateway” (an archway that invites the public both symbolically and physically) costs about $450,000. Boston schoolyards, which are considerably smaller, cost about $320,000 each for a new drainage system, plantings, hard surface area, play equipment, fences, decorative art, and an “outdoor classroom” with a micro-meadow, -woodland, and -garden.

As with so many other innovative ideas about the use of urban space, conflicts have arisen about cars. At one Boston site, a bitter battle broke out when some parents proposed converting a school parking lot into a soccer field; ultimately the soccer moms raised $200,000 in private funds and got their way.

Another successful program is Spark (School Park Program) in Houston, where the facilities are called Spark Parks. The program is run by a nonprofit in close cooperation with the mayor’s office. It works only with Houston-area school boards, not with any park department, but it has a strict requirement that the public must have access to the Spark parks after school hours and on weekends. The average Spark park costs between $75,000 and $100,000 and consists of modular play equipment, picnic tables, benches, an outdoor classroom (concrete steps and stage), a butterfly garden, a paved or crushed granite trail, and native trees. Founded in 1983, Spark created 203 parks in its first 25 years. Since 1990 the Spark program has put special emphasis on artwork, often murals or mosaics that the children help with. “It has become extremely popular,” said Spark Director Kathleen Ownby. “We’ve become one of the largest providers of outdoor art in the Houston area.”

The primary users of schoolyards are schoolchildren whose needs predominate. Because of the children, schoolyards are generally locked during school hours. While theoretically a minor issue, locks can cause unending problems, particularly if there is no park attendant or custodian on the premises. The central issue is: Who’s in charge? If the school system, the grounds are likely to be more tightly monitored but not as well maintained. If the park department controls and if the schoolyard is truly open as a neighborhood space, upkeep may be better but oversight of the children might be slightly compromised–there have been complaints of young early-morning users sometimes finding drug and sex paraphernalia in school parks that were open to the community the night before. (Others claim that the increased community use makes them safer than if they are locked.)

Many joint-use agreements break down over what seems to be an issue of legal liability but in fact is a smokescreen for more subjective factors of personality, power, and control. In Houston, the liability issue was resolved when the state of Texas agreed to indemnify schools and cities from certain incidents that occur on public grounds (aside from those due to inadequate maintenance). But in Philadelphia agreement over liability was never reached because there was no higher authority to force deadlocked negotiations to continue. (Until 2009, neither the Board of Education nor the Fairmount Park Commission was under the control of the mayor.) Creating a multiagency urban schoolyard park program succeeds more frequently when all the agencies are under the control of the mayor.

Chicago and New York are among the few cities where, because of mayoral interest, a partnership operates successfully between the board of education and the department of parks. In Chicago, in 1996, Mayor Richard M. Daley set an ambitious goal of converting 100 asphalt schoolyards into small parks. Called the Campus Park Program, it included playgrounds, baseball fields, basketball and tennis courts, and running tracks on a total of 150 acres. It was completed in four years at a cost of $43 million–$20 million each from the school system and the city, plus $3 million from the park district. Design was handled by the park district, construction by the Public Buildings Commission, and the process included community organizations. Ongoing maintenance is handled by the school district with as-needed assistance from the park district for larger properties.

The colorful new school and community playground at I.S. 62-The Ditmas School on opening day in Brooklyn, NY. Credit: Julieth Rivera.

New York City has taken the concept the furthest. There, with the blessing of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, The Trust for Public Land entered into a partnership with the Department of Education, the Department of Parks and Recreation and private funders (including MetLife, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation) to convert scores of decrepit and uninviting schoolyards into showcase parks. The program is simple in concept, complex in practice. The school recreation grounds are owned by the Department of Education, but the renovation work is overseen by the Department of Parks and TPL. Many decisions are made by the principal, the parent-teacher association, and the community. Proposals can be killed by teachers who don’t want to lose parking spaces, by custodians who don’t want to handle park maintenance, or by communities that don’t want kids out late playing basketball.

“This program is community-run,” says Mary Alice Lee, director of TPL’s New York City Playground Program. While all properties are fenced and have locks, in some places it’s the school custodial staff that has the only key, while in others it’s held by the neighborhood sponsoring organization or a block association. A few of the parks are left permanently unlocked. Also, each community sets its own hours. Most common is a schedule of 8 a.m. to dusk seven days a week except when school is in session. In some tougher neighborhoods the community wants the park closed earlier; the most restrictive schedule is 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays, and closed on Sundays.

Designing the space itself is a delicate balancing act that can take up to three months. The children themselves are the lead designers, responding to a set of questions and opportunities posed by TPL, but of course there are a bevy of realities that also affect decisions, including liability, equipment breakability, horticultural survivability, cost, and life lessons from previous play-parks. The children learn how to innovate, compromise, and reach a consensus when their initial ideas turn out to be too expensive or require too much space.

“Because of the kids,” says Lee, “we’ve created murals and mosaics, a hair-braiding area, a jump-rope zone, planting gardens, performance stages, outdoor classrooms, rain gardens, and bowling lanes–as well as the usual soccer fields, running tracks, basketball and tennis courts, and play equipment.”

Maintenance is the responsibility of the school custodial staff. Often they turn down a particular piece of equipment; in some cases they have nixed the playground entirely. As for natural grass, it has proven impossible to maintain under intense usage, and TPL now uses only artificial turf for the play-parks’ ballfields. Houston’s Spark program, in contrast, forbids artificial turf and uses only natural grass.

When the City of Philadelphia asked its residents that simple question, they found that 1 in 8 residents – 200,000 people – couldn’t come up with an answer. Why? Because there isn’t a city park within a 10-minute walk of where they live.

Green2015

Philadelphia is understandably proud of its 4,000-acre Fairmount Park, but much of the city’s population lacks access to neighborhood green spaces which provide recreation space, manage stormwater, and raise property values. The city’s response is a plan called Green2015. It aims to turn 500 acres of vacant and underused land into parks, which would make the distribution of parkland far more equitable and provide manifold financial and environmental benefits.

Though privately owned vacant rowhouse lots cover 5 percent of the city’s land area, the plan focuses on tapping into 2,400 acres of available public land, over half of which is schoolyards. Park development will be targeted towards park-poor areas with high populations of children, seniors, and low-income households.

The report notes that the new green spaces won’t necessarily resemble traditional city parks. For example, many of the parks will be made by adding trees, running tracks, and small lawns to asphalt-covered recreation centers and school playgrounds. Schoolyards represent a great resource: there are over 400 acres of schoolyards supporting a population of 36,000 students in park-poor areas of the city. It is calculated that every acre of greened schoolyard provides 260 residents with park access.

The city will achieve this goal without any new taxes in part by relying on cooperation from foundations and community organizations. The report highlights an initiative in Detroit as a model for increasing tree cover in the city while also putting vacant lots to productive use. A group called The Greening of Detroit runs a program which uses vacant lots as urban tree farms (a single acre, if fully devoted to growing, can yield up to 1,400 trees). The trees are tended for 3-5 years, and then transplanted into the community.

A secondary priority of the city is better stormwater management, in part because the Water Department can provide funds for park development through its Green City, Clean Waters program. A greened city acre can prevent 900,000 gallons of water from entering the sewer system each year.

In addition to these recreational and environmental benefits, Philadelphia sees significant economic value in this initiative. In a later post, we’ll expand on some of the other effects that Green2015 could have on Philadelphia’s property values. We’ll also highlight some creative land re-utilization strategies employed by other cities burdened with large quantities of vacant land.